Operational Anchor Preservation

tibsfox/operational-anchor-preservation

> Use before you shorten, compress, or rewrite the BODY of an existing SKILL.md or agent .md — the moment you are about to cut text to reduce length. First inventory the file's operational anchors (exact code / command / API snippets, fail-closed workflow guards, and rule / threshold statements), preserve every one, then judge the rewrite by expected downstream task cost (exploration, debugging, recovery tokens) rather than by the resulting line count. A shorter skill that strips an anchor makes the agent MORE expensive per task, so length is never the objective and rewrite is not compression. Backed by Preserving Operational Anchors When Compressing Agent Instructions (arxiv 2606.09421v2). Triggers on shortening or refactoring a skill or agent body.